The last two decades have seen an enormous increase in discussion and interdisciplinary work on the relation of text and image. Ekphrasis was a genre especially popular in the Second Sophistic but this useful collection of thirteen papers shows that it had a far wider range in time and culture (see the introduction of A. Stavru, "Ekphrasis ed enargeia. Figurare tramite parole e dire tramite immagini," 5-7); the contributions cover also many lesser-known aspects of the subject.

After the introduction, the first two contributions treat mainly methodical aspects; the following ten are arranged in approximately chronological order. F. De Martino, "Ekphrasis e pubblicità. Descrivere e valorizzare nell'antica Grecia" (9-22) gives an overview of the ancient theoretical treatises on ekphrasis and goes on to show that while in Lucian's time the notion was used almost exclusively for the description of works of art, it had initially a far wider range and could be applied to a variety of objects. G. Lombardo, "Aspetto verbale e tecniche dell'enargeia. La dimensione «aoristica» della descrizione " (23–34) explores the main concept of ekphrasis, i. e. the visualization (enargeia), the skill of the ancient author to make the objects he describes visible for the reader or listener (who thus becomes a viewer), a technique already splendidly mastered by Homer (cf. the description of the setting of the sun Od. 3,497).

The wide range of conceptions of ekphrasis is then impressively demonstrated by the two following papers investigating Plato's dialogues from this point of view (L. Palumbo, "Portare il lettore nel cuore del testo. L'ekphrasis nei dialoghi di Platone" (35-46) and J.-J. Wunenberger, "Lo specchio delle immagini. Gerarchia e traduzione delle rappresentazioni in Platone" (47-57). Enargeia is shown to be a psychological as well as a linguistic phenomenon, and Plato's verba videndi provided also a theoretical foundation for his theory of ideas (41-42). The search for truth has to use the medium of language (for lack of something better), which in turn makes use of pictures and examples (51-54).

A most impressive example of enargeia are the furies that Aeschylus literally puts before the public's eyes in Eum. 46-59 and that are treated in Ps.-Longinus's De subl. 15, 2, where another important issue of ekphrasis, the concept of phantasia comes into view, as a means to achieve the elevated style (P. Togni, "«Vedere le Erinni». La fantasia nel capitolo 15 del trattato Sul sublime" [59-79]).

M. Squire, "Invertire l'ekphrasis. L'epigramma ellenistico e la traslazione di parola e immagine" (81-107) is a brilliant tour de force, applying the definition of Theon, progymn. 118,7 to three examples in completely different media that demonstrate in different ways that ekphrasis is defined rather by its effects on the listener/viewer than by its object. The first (88-93) is a grave-stele from Sardis (2nd cent. BC) of a girl called Menophila in guise of a Muse and surrounded by objects of culture and learning that are described in an epigrammatic dialogue of questions and answers. The second example (93-98) is the five great panels of the "Casa degli Epigrammi" in Pompeii (40-30 BC) with epigrams that seem at first glance to explain the pictures (e.g. a fight between Eros and Pan). Those epigrams (included in the Anthologia Palatina), however, had at the time they were put on the murals in Pompeii long been known, but from a totally different context. This leaves the reader with the question what came first, and what the precise relationship between the epigrams and paintings might be. Finally (98-107), Squire presents some of the intriguing carmina figurata that were popular from Hellenistic to Imperial times and depict the objects they describe via the length and arrangement of the verses. Could this playful poetry still be called ekphrasis? While this might depend on how rigorously the definitions of ancient theoretical treatises on the genre are applied, in any case Squire's stimulating article demonstrates that seemingly straightforward cases are often more complex than it appears at first sight. All the examples presented here play with the topic of "putting in front of your eyes" and the intricacies of interaction between two media: is it the text that explains the image, or is it the other way round?

Equally interesting is the contribution of C. Roby, "L'ekphrasis e l'immaginazione scientifica in Tolomeo" (109-125), showing the use of the genre in a rather unexpected context, the mathematical and astronomical treatises of Ptolemy, where it is used as a means to convince the reader regarding his theories and for explaining imaginary experiments.

Somewhat disappointing is J. Pigeaud, "Note sull'ekphrasis in Filostrato, Luciano e Callistrato" (127-161), arranged in 26 often minuscule "chapters" the common thread of which eludes this reader. Beginning with Philostratus, Pigeaud mentions de Vigenères' first translation of the Imagines, and points out several times Goethe's fascination with the text, but gives no hint of the dispute that started in the 18th century about the reality of the gallery of images Philostratus describes.1 He also totally avoids engaging with important newer scholarship on Lucian's ekphraseis, e.g. the thought-provoking article of B. Borg.2 I also fail to see the specific connection of the "praise of phantasia" (130-137) with the authors treated. The part on Callistratus (157-160), finally, consists mainly of short summaries of some of his descriptions of statues, referring only to the translation of A. Fairbanks of 1979, without taking into account the most recent edition with commentary.3 Altogether this contribution seems rather a missed opportunity, for it does not really further the understanding of the three authors named in the title.

More modest in its scope, but much more rewarding and in-depth is the contribution of E. Prioux, "I colori di Filostrato il Vecchio. Dalla pittura delle emozioni e dei caratteri alle metafore dell'opera sofistica" (169-185) on the importance of colors in Philostratus's Imagines. Among the 180 references to colors, gold, black and white are predominant (163-165). Colors are usually mentioned to convey emotions to the reader (165-171), a procedure already known from Hellenistic poetry (e.g. Apollonius Rhodius); an especially impressive example is the use of a gloomy chiaroscuro to depict scenes with dead people or nocturnal tableaus (e.g. II 10, Cassandra; II 29, Antigone). While Philostratus apparently had something like a scientific interest in optical effects and their depictions, he also used color as a metaphor to express his aesthetic intentions: a black-and-white animal could represent a stylistic or literary hybrid (171-177). Attached to the article is a useful appendix containing the Greek names and context of the colors mentioned in Philostratus (179-185).

With A. Motta, "L'Ekphrasis del discorso. Una lezione neoplatonica sul miglior artefatto" (187-200) we move into the realm of late antique philosophy; he analyzes the Neoplatonic interpretations that regard Plato as the demiurgos who creates an intelligible picture of beauty.

D. Guastini, "Ekphrasis e tipologia tra cultura pagana e cultura cristiana" (201-216) focuses on the transformations of the genre in Christian contexts, first the ekphrasis as such that applied the models of classical times in an eclectic way, e.g. to describe Christian sacral buildings. I have some difficulties with the second part (208-216) on the question of typology, which according to Guastini blended Jewish prophetical tradition with Hellenistic principles. The result in a Christian context would have a very different meaning, often opposing the tradition that brought it into life. One would have wished for some specific literary examples to elucidate that point. Finally, with Quintilian's figura (inst. 9,1) replaced by Christian praefiguratio, the modality of the whole genre changes and is now oriented toward a future telos, as opposed to the pagan nostalgic retrospection toward a former Golden Age. Here, the connection of the topic with ekphrasis remains rather unclear; it would seem that this contribution deals with a rather different subject of research, i.e. the notion of time in pagan and Christian perceptions.4

P. Marzillo, "L'antro delle Ninfe. Da locus amoenus a locus functionalis" (217-231) shows the interval of time the fascinating interaction between text and art was able to bridge, for it was most likely Porphyry's De antro Nympharum, the Neoplatonic interpretation of Homer's description of the cave of the Nymphs in Od. 13, 96-112 that inspired a mural painting in the hypogeum (i.e. the burial place) of the renowned family of the Aurelii in Rome.

A. Vasilu, "Del divino nelle techniche. Descrivere in stile omerico alla fine dell'antichità" (233-268) finally gives an (at times somewhat lengthy) overview of the ways and techniques of ekphrasis to demonstrate the different forms of perception, the objects of ekphrasis and its connections to myth. She starts with the famous "foundation piece" of all ekphraseis, Achilles' shield in Il. 18,462-61, that inspired many later descriptions (237-243) and goes on to the complicated story of the two rings in Heliodorus's novel Aithiopika, where it is surprisingly not the one with the precisely described bucolic scene on the amethyst that plays the decisive role in the recognition of the protagonists, but the other one of which we are told nothing (243-250). Then she takes a further step forward in time (251-256) with the description of the palace of Cadmus in Nonnus' Dionysiaka 3, 131-183. The next paragraph takes us to the kind of "rhetorical exercise" that Gregory of Nyssa delivered in his 20th letter (256-261), in which we see astonishingly nothing of his Christian convictions. We return to Homer with the final example of the description of the portrait of the poet (262-266) by Christodorus in the baths of Zeuxippus (Anth. Pal. II): Via his description, the late antique author becomes himself a kind of new Homer.

On the whole the book is an interesting and welcome contribution to the current ongoing discourse about the subject. There are many varied aspects covered, including some rather remote and lesser-known ones, so no doubt other readers will find yet other topics of interest not mentioned by this reviewer.

Over 20 scholars have participated in this edition and there is a valuable appendix : "Games competitors and performers in Roman Egypt" by S. Remijsen pp. 190-206. This is a useful idea, because a good portion of the papyri presented here were the subject of a meeting and seminar at the British Academy in June 2012, which focused on papyri that were relevant to games and performances. (This reviewer was present.) Some of the papyri here are of extraordinary interest far beyond the world of sport and festival in antiquity, and will be highlighted.

There are 25 papyri, a few previous published: 12 new literary texts; 6 known texts; 5 subliterary fragments; and 13 documentary papyri. The literary fragments are small and attributed to Euripides (dubiously?), old and new comedy, mime, hexameters, and lyric, and the commentary explores in great depth the possibilities. Notable (pp.20, 27) is the expected alphabetic denomination of characters in mime, with another example of a seventh character. The mime 5188 is verse but written in prose, but 5189 is prose, mixes vulgarities and tragic references, and appears to include stage directions in the text, which makes the editor suggest that this "knock-about comedy" was all meant to be fleshed out in performance. These fragments are more than usually full of desperate interpretative puzzles. Interesting is 5187, yet another example of the Maiden's Lament type of lyrical singing as dramatic monologue, which can be construed as a form of mime, deriving from Euripidean monodies. There follow 5192, prose scraps with references to games and contests, and 5193, a history of antique games containing the remarkable accusation that in the time of Periander τὸ δεινόν spread from the Isthmian games to the others, and that this dreadful innovation concerned ἱερονῖκαι. As the commentator say (p.76), the tone suggests rhetorical argument. 5194, "encomium of the Logos" has been previously published, and is likely a progymnasma of a student.

The known texts include Aristophanes, Plut. 881-97; Menander, Misoumenos 123-54 Sand. with some new details; and the scrap of lines 352-65. Subliterary texts begin with remarkable scholia on Pindar Olympian 1, originally prepared by W.S. Barrett, here completed by D. Obbink, dating to either first century BC or AD. Its importance lies not in what we learn about Pindar, since it is "elementary and perfunctory" and overlaps with the mediaeval scholia, but for the mode of its comment. It writes out practically the complete text in successive lemmata, and then translates them into simple language. Barrett / Obbink call this a paraphrase, which is not an ancient term. There are, it seems to me, two important deductions. The first is that one could reconstruct easily the text of an ancient author from such independent books of scholia, which could therefore be used without (and which might well not be accompanied by) any text of the classical author. This is in my view how the commentaries of Aristarchus and his fellows were best known to later scholars. Secondly, of the several words used to convey the notion of our "paraphrase", the most illuminating is ἐξήγησις: to translate is to explain, and this was a principal method of ancient scholars. 5201 may be an ancient Loeb text, but it was mainstream scholarship as well.

The jewel of this collection is 5202, called "a copy of an honorific inscription for the poetic victor Apion", well treated by A. Benaissa. This is indeed the same Apion, who was the victim of an entire book of abuse by Josephus, and who is now best known for the dreary scholarly remarks preserved in the Homeric Lexicon of Apollonius Sophistes. As is obvious now, Apion was not just a grammarian, but a famous poet and tragedian, much decorated in the great festivals (Olympia, Pythia, Isthmia) and much honoured with statues and other paraphernalia in Rome, Sicily and his homeland Egypt. He was a principal representative of international Greek culture. Benaissa I think rightly argues for Alexandria as his hometown; Josephus said he came from an oasis, but we should long ago have learned to distrust Josephus, and now we have proof of his mendacity. The form of this C.V. eulogy is familiar from inscriptions, and there is even an addition such as we find in inscriptions too. We can now see that similar eulogies circulated in papyri, and therefore in posters. There is much extraordinary detail here: he is praised as the first poet to formally return to his homeland in a four-horse chariot and to be honoured with the gold crown of the periodonikes. He anticipates Nero, but is Nero imitating Apion? The athletic union at Rome (Claudian?) honours him, as does the Dionysiac technitae in Syracuse. I allow myself one query. In the midst of the details of his festival triumphs, we read (l.5-6) καὶ ἐπὶ Σεβαστὸν | παραγε[ν]όμ[ενο]ν ἀγῶνα, which Benaissa reasonably takes to be the Sebasta Italika of Naples. The last two words are both doubtful, and the objections are in the commentary: the Sebasta are never called by this name, though a σεβαστὸς ἀγών appears elsewhere, and "appearing at a contest" is not a victory or honour of any kind. I am certain that the text is a mistake, but can offer no easy correction, though I surmise that the original idea was that he had been an ambassador to the emperor. 5203 is the well known list of the songs of Epagathos the choraules taken from six plays, published by W. Cockle in 1975 and thus is in TrGF V.2 (Kannicht) as DID B 15a. 5204 is another set of "instructions for pankration" addressed in the imperative alternately to two athletes like POxy 466. W. Henry prefers to take these seriously, but cites without discussion S. Remijsen for the opinion that they were directions for an exhibition fight, which I think comes closer to the truth. My own view is that they are librettos for gymnasium skiamachia, and were accompanied by music. But proof is impossible. 5205 is a defixio for a chariot race, the first on papyrus.

The documentary texts are of considerable interest to historians. 5207 are receipts for the great Olympic pankratist M.A. Plutarchos known from Philostratos. 5208 belongs to the well familiar verbiage laden petitions for membership in the union of the Dionysiac Artists, but this application is from a chief priestess, yet another example of a non-performer seeking the privileges of performers. Undoubtedly the document that will achieve greatest notoriety in the world at large is the "contract to lose a wrestling match" attested in 5209. The representatives of two boys contract legally for the outcome of a wrestling match for 3800 dr., the same price as that of a donkey. Match-fixing is well attested in athletics, but we were unaware that it could be the subject of a legal contract. 5210 is the subject of a fine commentary by D. Rathbone and F. Maltomini. An appeal for freedom from civilia munera dated to 298/9 AD is made on the grounds of being a genuine sacred victor and older than 60 years. This shows that Diocletian had introduced his legislation against the abuses of festival awards before this date, and so we can now delimit this imperial assault on union excess probably earlier in the period 293-298 AD. 5215-18 are brief circus programmes with a useful discussion of the other known programmes of this sort. I wonder if the "vokalioi" who appear several times cannot always be choral claqueurs, as they are later certainly in Byzantium, and so equivalent to modern cheerleaders, one possibility raised by Mountford on 5215,9.

The appendix by S. Remijsen giving a history of imperial Egyptian festivals and their operation will be of great value to those seeking a context for these documents, since it collects in convenient form material not readily available to the non-specialist. There are good indices and detailed plates. As is to be expected of this series, the proofreading and editing of such difficult material is exemplary. Perhaps the commentary on such fragments is bound to be more generous and speculative than would be normal, but on the other hand the parallel material laboriously compiled is often a valuable resource in itself, and judgement is always fair and balanced. It is a pleasure to see more than twenty international scholars working together in the resolution of the problems posed by such new fragments. One could wish this example to be followed in other disciplines. Much of the credit must go to the generosity and good sense of that elder statesman of papyrology, Professor Peter Parsons.

Bloomsbury's series of sets of books on cultural history includes the topic of gardens. Following Bloomsbury's editorial scheme, the set embraces six volumes, each covering a major historical period. All the volumes of a set are built around the same recurring themes in order to facilitate crosswise reading and historical comparison. The books thus appeal to historians as well as garden specialists—including of course those endorsing the perspectives of cultural history, the expressed target of Bloomsbury's undertaking. The present review will consider the first volume of the garden set, on gardens in antiquity. My perspective is that of a reader specializing in classical archaeology and ancient history who hoped to enlarge her knowledge of antiquity by a deeper acquaintance with gardens and gardening.

Let it be said at once: the book successfully addresses the three large questions that the general editors of the garden set, John Dixon Hunt and Michael Leslie, have devised: "...why were gardens created? How were they used or visited… And how does their representation in different arts express the position and value of the garden within its culture..." (xii). It is thus not a book that deals in breadth with single gardens and their perceptible physical shapes, or single sections or points in classical texts on gardens; such material rather forms the presupposition for the large, contextual perspectives. The introduction by the editor, Kathryn Gleason, raises points that are helpful in setting the gardens of antiquity in relief against those of other periods and in marking special characteristics of the research that they have attracted. The design described as 'the quadripartite garden' forms the start of the discussion—the first chapter of the first book in the garden series is certainly the right place for evoking this famous archetype with its nostalgic associations with paradise and Eastern environments. Gleason makes clear that it has no bearing on actual, Greek and Roman gardens, although it has sometimes been associated with them as a result of a misguided scholarly tradition. Turning then to actual physical remains of gardens, in particular Roman ones, Gleason gives a quick view into how archaeology is able, finally, to modify and add to the textual evidence that has reigned remarkably sovereign in scholarship on gardens in antiquity up to quite recently. The section concludes with a reference to the great achievements in landscaping and palatial garden building that were due to the Persians, Egyptians and Anatolians before both the Greeks and Romans. With this indication of the earliest traditions in the Mediterranean and the possibility, even probability, of long lines of cultural transference, much of the scene is set, despite the brevity of the text. What follows is an indication of important dialectics relevant to Western garden culture as a whole—"pleasure versus utility, public versus private, and informal versus formal"—probing them from the perspective of antiquity. A few illustrating examples are given, just enough to flash initial insights. Gleason ends with a report on the methods of modern archaeological investigations of gardens, drawing in part on her own experience as a field archaeologist. She exposes the profits that have already accrued, and will continue to accrue as methods for recovering information from the soil become steadily more refined. "These new discoveries are revealing the framework of garden designs: terraces, walks, planting beds, tree pits, planting pots, root cavities, statue bases, water features, and environmental evidence of the degree of shade/sun" (p. 13).1

The remaining chapters have the following titles: Design, Types of gardens, Plantings, Use and reception, Meaning, Verbal representations, Visual representations, and Gardens and the larger landscape.

Gleason herself, writing on design, presents a useful survey of terms met with in Vitruvius that, if correctly understood, are able to increase our knowledge of Roman gardens.2 The relevance of many of these terms to gardens has rarely been appreciated, but new research on Vitruvius' text has demonstrated their reference to new forms of design and to the reshaping of the traditional garden in the last decades B.C. The actual design process of such gardens is likewise dependent on the fruition of new scholarly work on Vitruvius' specifications for architectural building projects. The possible stages of garden construction, from initial surveying and levelling to the final work of planting in imported topsoil and setting up of statues etc., can now be grasped and set out graphically (note the image of Fig. 1:3 on p. 26). These results are to some extent secured by archaeological findings, yet it is remarkable that so much knowledge could be retrieved from recent close analysis of a classical text that is not as explicit as one could wish. The latter part of the chapter dwells on three particular types of garden design that Vitruvius' work helps to illuminate, and where he himself is more explicit: gardens on large substructures ('hanging gardens'), promenades, and viridia (formally arranged assemblages of plants). The combination of walkways and plantings is stressed. It reflects the cultural feature of walking in green surroundings, important for both Greece and Rome in antiquity, whether for philosophical discussions or for recreation and amusement.

I have described Gleason's introduction and chapter on design rather fully, since they reflect much of the most interesting new research on gardens in antiquity. Lena Landgren's text on the plants of Roman gardens, contributing supplementary knowledge of viridia, horticultural practises, and gardeners, should be read alongside Gleason's. The rest of the book presents material that fills out the picture. Some contributions have a wide scope, assuming the character of surveys. The substantial chapter by Inge Nielsen on types of gardens in antiquity is the clearest example. It covers gardens and garden construction all the way from the early paradeisoi of Egypt and the Near East (2nd–1st millennia B.C.) to gardens in private houses in Athens dating from Late Antiquity (5th century A.D.). This huge, unwieldy body of material is kept under strict control by divisions into types according to the relationship of the garden to the non-garden environment, and by subdivisions into function, public/private character, etc. Despite being a relatively tough read, this chapter, with its notably well worked-out footnotes and lavish bibliographical references, will be a rich source for those seeking a wide knowledge of gardens in antiquity. Another survey, by Catherine Kearns, of visual representations of gardens, has a similarly wide chronological and geographical coverage. Here, the presentation is sketchier, and this reader would have liked to be at least minimally introduced into the diverse cultural settings of the pictorial creations. The sibling chapter on verbal representations, by Anthony Littlewood and Katharine von Stackelberg, is more successful owing in part to the possibility of assembling the material according to literary genres, Greek and Roman, and thereby disclosing the cultural pattern that resides in the combinations of particular concepts of gardens and gardening with particular genres.

The text by Littlewood and von Stackelberg moves between descriptive survey and analysis. The remaining subjects receive similar treatments. These include "Gardens and the Larger Landscape" by Kelly Cook and Rachel Foulk, "Use and reception" by Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis and "Meaning" by Katharine von Stackelberg. The first is motivated by the assumption that distinct practises and attitudes in relation to the management of land and to agriculture will have influenced gardens and gardening. The second explains "the intersection between design and use", concentrating in effect on use, as the precise original designs are often lost. Some interesting themes such as political activity receive attention here in connection with villa or palace gardens or with public parks. The third, "Meaning", takes up a set of general concepts and the ways in which these were expressed by classical gardens: separation, security, alien territory, sacredness, fecundity, government, gratification. The entire range of ancient gardens is invoked, starting with Sumer. The chapter serves the volume well by not placing its matter too high above the empirical foundations but still high enough to be of general interest to garden specialists.

Let us finally touch on the possible diversity of reader expectations that I brought up at the beginning. The garden specialists will probably find that the book under review serves them well in presenting both designs and ideas in a rich assortment. For the period specialists, the situation may be less clear-cut. Gleason's introduction and opening chapter on design strike a good balance between gardens and antiquity. On the whole, however, the various historical backgrounds as presented in the book are not always made as apparent as the present reader would have wished. Some good and relevant historical questions are thereby forgone. Among those are, for instance, the following: How does it come about that the new forms of luxury garden appeared at the time that they did, around 30-20 B.C.? What structural factors of society promoted them? Why, on the whole, did they appear in Rome rather than (earlier) in Greece? Perhaps we should wait for the Roman historians to take over here, once the garden specialists have had their say. Admittedly, the more general contexts of Greek and Roman gardens come out reasonably well, at least after the perusal of a couple of chapters. Still, any survey of a chronological range of more than two thousand years and of radically different geopolitical systems is bound to run into a problem. A short (two- or three-page) guide to the civilizations discussed in the book, with a graphic timeline, would have helped readers with little knowledge of antiquity. So also would a map of the Mediterranean regions. There is a bibliography and a good index. The supply of photographs is reasonable, but since all except the ones on the cover are black-and-white they are deficient when it comes to pictorial representations of gardens and their combined effects of form, colour and light. The Roman wall paintings of gardens at Pompeii and Oplontis, rightly famous, are particularly disadvantaged. They come out as shadows of themselves, the brilliant atmospheric qualities all but deadened. Colour photos are, after all, becoming commonplace in scholarly publications. Moreover, the decision against them, surely taken on the highest editorial level, appears not only strange in view of the boastful online blurb of the publishing house --"Superbly illustrated…"3—but also ungenerous for a book that is otherwise as generous as the present one.

Notes:

1. The recent book on garden archaeology (with Gleason herself as one of the contributors), Amina-Aichna Malek, Sourcebook for Garden Archaeology. Methods, Techniques, Interpretations and Field Examples, Parcs et Jardins 1, Bern 2013, provides a detailed demonstration of the remarkable progress of the new 'soil archaeology'. 2. List given on pp. 16-17. 3. See the publisher's web page (url above) where the phrase "superbly illustrated" is used for this set.

This volume contains the Latin text of Giovanni Pontano's dialogue Aegidius edited and translated into Italian by Francesco Tateo, together with Tateo's introduction and notes.

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429-1503) served five kings of Naples in positions ranging from scribe to prime minister, headed a famous humanist sodality, and transcribed and annotated the works of several ancient authors. He composed brilliant Latin poetry in many genres and enough prose works to fill several copious volumes. Among his most important works are the five dialogues that he composed over the thirty-year period from around 1471 to a year or so before his death. The last and greatest of these is Aegidius, a philosophical and religious discussion well described by David Marsh as "Pontano's literary and spiritual testament." 1

Pontano's dialogues have long been in need of a modern edition. The first (and the last) scholarly edition of all five dialogues was published by Carmelo Previtera in 1943 (Giovanni Pontano, I Dialoghi). It met a harsh reception.2 Nonetheless, the German translation published forty years later reprinted Previtera's text unchanged (Dialoge, Hermann Kiefer et al., trans. Munich, 1984). In 2012 the I Tatti Renaissance Library published my edition and English translation of the two earliest dialogues (Charon and Antonius). These were the easiest to edit, since the obvious basis of their text was the edition of them printed and corrected in Pontano's lifetime.3 The other dialogues have awaited an editor, but Aegidius, at least, has found one well suited to the task.

Francesco Tateo has devoted many books and articles to Pontano, and several to the dialogues. His early article (1964; see note 2) on the text of Actius is required reading for anyone attempting the difficult task of editing that dialogue, and a future editor would do well to find his recent article on the same subject, which is apparently not yet available, although it is dated 2012.4 Tateo has also written literary articles on all five dialogues, treated Pontano's poetry, and edited and translated Pontano's ethical works. 5

In the introduction Tateo places Aegidius in its intellectual and cultural context. The inspiration for the dialogue was Pontano's encounter with the famous Augustinian theologian and papal orator Egidio da Viterbo (the Aegidius of the title) when Egidio visited Naples around 1501. Egidio (1469-1532), a generation younger than Pontano, was already well on his way to becoming a central figure in the religious and intellectual culture of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Tateo argues that the encounter had a profound effect on Pontano, providing a challenge to his own long-held philosophical and religious ideas. Both men were highly educated and deeply religious; both were profoundly convinced of the importance of rhetoric, oratory, and what one might call the power of the word, whether in its secular or in its Christian sense. But their perspectives were very different. Pontano, devoted to Cicero and Aristotle, was as much interested in this world as in the next, espousing "un classicismo, perfino al limite paganeggiante, ma sostanzialmente non lontano da una sorta di umanesimo cristiano" (p. 12). Egidio, "un religioso oltre tutto" (p. 12), was a theologian steeped in Augustinian and Platonic philosophy, mysticism, and the esoteric works of late antiquity, as well as the cabbala. Tateo's subtle and well documented discussion presents the dialogue as Pontano's exploration of the issues arising from the juxtaposition of such different ways of approaching religious and philosophical questions. He notes that although Aegidius is the most dialectical of the dialogues, it presents not a confrontation or clash of opinions, but rather an exchange of views expressed in the different voices of the interlocutors, each raising and treating questions from his own perspective and area of competence (p. 16). The dialogue is not so much a debate as a meeting of minds ranging over various topics, which include creation, dreams, free will, the immortality of the soul, the relation between heaven and earth, astrology, and mysticism. Underpinning it all is Pontano's assumption of a convergence between classicism (including myth) and the ideas of fifteenth-century Christianity. Tateo brings all these themes together in what one should probably regard not as a mere introduction but rather as an appreciation or reading of the dialogue as a whole. Particularly interesting to me was his discussion of the opening scene in which two interlocutors greet Pontano in the name of the Muses. Tateo presents it as an introduction to the theme of convergence, arguing that it both establishes a link between literary and religious inspiration and prepares readers for connections between other ancient and modern (fifteenth-century) themes. The latter, not surprisingly, include some ideas especially important to Pontano himself. One of these is the theme of the garden, in Pontano's presentation of which Tateo finds affinities between Paradise, Elysium, the Garden of the Hesperides (subject of Pontano's poem, De hortis Hesperidum), Vergil's country villa, and Pontano's own Villa Antiniana.

Appended to the introduction is a detailed discussion of the text. Aegidius, along with its sister dialogues Actius and Asinus, was printed in 1507, four years after Pontano's death, in a volume edited by his friend and frequent amanuensis, Pietro Summonte.6 No manuscript in Pontano's own hand exists, but we do have a manuscript transcribed in his lifetime (Rome, Biblioteca Corsiniana, 36 F 16), which bears the date 1501; this manuscript shows some signs of revision by its scribe, whom Tateo does not attempt to identify. It was certainly not Summonte, whose hand is well known. This is a point on which I would have welcomed some speculation on Tateo's part, for the identity of the scribe would certainly be relevant to the authority of the manuscript.

Tateo reports the differences between the Corsini manuscript and Summonte's edition, but with only a few exceptions prints the latter. His course may strike some readers as over cautious, but it is probably sound. On the one hand we have the evidence of the manuscript, on the other the well-documented tendency of Summonte to revise Pontano's text to accord with his own ideas of linguistic, orthographical, and theological correctness, as well as his manipulation of names in the various works.7 But the manuscript is dated two years before Pontano's death, and there is always the possibility, however exiguous, that Pontano made some or all of the changes himself in a lost manuscript.

Tateo's text clearly supersedes that of Previtera in both quality and convenience. Dispensing with an apparatus criticus, he follows the princeps of 1507, but includes and discusses the few major variants from the manuscript in footnotes. Previtera, by contrast, presented an apparatus cluttered with readings from sixteenth-century editions; he did not know the Corsini manuscript. By following the princeps Tateo reproduces what he calls the "usus pontaniano" in orthography and word division, bringing us as close as possible to what Pontano actually wrote, whereas Previtera preferred to smooth out and standardize Pontano's usage. Tateo also breaks the text into numbered paragraphs and indicates scene divisions with bracketed numerals—a practice that makes it easy to cite and refer to passages. Previtera's text, without such standard aids, could be cited only by page and line number.

Tateo's text also benefits from a facing Italian translation as well as from copious explanatory footnotes, which are full enough to be described as a commentary; they identify historical figures and events, discuss Latin usage, treat textual problems, and identify ancient and Renaissance works cited in the text. All the notes are provided with extremely valuable references. These would have been still more useful had the volume been provided with a bibliography. Without it, the search for references is unnecessarily difficult, especially since works cited more than once are not accompanied by a full bibliographical reference, but rather by the abbreviation, "cit.," which forces one to look through previous notes for the full citation.

The volume is handsomely produced, but unfortunately contains far too many misprints. A few are worth mentioning: the date of Previtera's edition is given as 1443 (p. 25); princeps appears as princepes (p. 29, l. 1); a bibliographical reference is printed twice (p. 25, n.3), etc. I saw one misprint in the text itself: surnus for sumus (p. 34); there may be others. If Tateo's work becomes the standard edition of Aegidius, as I expect it will, the copy editors should scrutinize it with great care before it is reprinted.

But these are small points. Tateo's edition is an extremely important contribution not only to the study of Aegidius, but also to that of Pontano himself. It will be welcomed by scholars of both Pontano and Neapolitan humanism.

This masterful book explores modes of visuality in the writings of the early Rabbis, the small group of sages who lived in Palestine and Babylonia in the first through sixth centuries CE. Rachel Neis structures the book around four primary themes within which she explores Rabbinic understandings of sight: God, the erotic, idols, and the rabbinic sage. As she analyzes passages taken from a wide range of Rabbinic literature, Neis remains closely engaged with broader scholarly conversations about vision and aesthetics in Late Antiquity and beyond.

In her introduction, Neis lays out the theoretical and historical background for her investigation of Rabbinic visuality.1 She frames her project as a response to the historical portrayal of Judaism as fundamentally anti-visual, a tendency supposedly stemming from its aniconic theological commitments. Neis compellingly argues for detaching the study of vision from the study of images and challenges the notion that there is such a thing as a distinctively Jewish mode of relating to vision, questioning whether there is anything fundamentally "Jewish" about the rabbinic discourse of seeing. She argues instead that the Rabbis partook of shared contemporary theories of vision in the construction and reproduction of a distinctive Rabbinic subject. Finally, Neis questions this portrayal by what she calls "giving eyes" to the rabbis of Late Antiquity: that is, attempting to discover what they looked at and how.

In the first chapter, Neis notes that she is not so much interested in what is seen as much as in how it is seen. She gathers information about techniques of vision through the analysis of texts rather than artifacts. The belief in an intimate relationship between language and vision is inherent in Greco-Roman thought, as exemplified in the ancient art of ekphrasis, the production of vivid mental images through the use of words. Neis also addresses scholarly concerns about the privileging of sight, pointing out that for the rabbis, vision does not exist on its own but is closely bound up with other senses (such as touch) and modes of experiencing the material world (like eating and sex). Finally, she puts forth the characteristics of what she terms "Late Antique visual theory," focusing primarily on Greco-Roman and Zoroastrian understandings of sight. Two of the defining elements of the way the Rabbis understood vision are the belief in intromissive and extramissive properties of sight (that vision is caused by something entering and/or exiting the eye) and haptic vision (the intertwining of the sense of vision with the sense of touch). This definition of vision is paralleled in other Late Antique works ranging from Galen's De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis to Zoroastrian texts on medicine as the Denkard, revealing the breadth of cultural exchange during this period.

In her second and third chapters, Neis tackles the premise of Jewish aniconism in an examination of rabbinic modes of seeing God. The second chapter explores the rabbinic interpretation of Deuteronomy 16:16: "Three times a year all your males shall see the face (yir'eh et-pene) of the Lord your God in the place that he shall choose—on the feast of the Unleavened Bread, on the Feast of Weeks, and on the Feast of Tabernacles—and they shall not see the face of the Lord empty."2 The early rabbis interpreted this obligation—termed "re'iyah," or "seeing"—as a reciprocal one. Not only must the pilgrim see God, but he must also be seen, and therefore must be worthy of being seen. This emphasis on visual reciprocity, which Neis terms "homovisuality," is carried forward in the Babylonian Talmud, in which the encounter between pilgrim and God is portrayed as a mutual gaze in which each party looks at the other with both eyes.

In Chapter 3, Neis traces descriptions of visual asymmetry and mediated God-seeing, which she terms "heterovisuality," as a result of God's absence after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. A heterovisual experience of God entails a unidirectional visual encounter with a material object that represents the divine. In such an encounter God is "is entirely a visual object and not a seeing subject" (95). Neis argues that whether they imagined a heterovisual or homovisual encounter with the divine, the Rabbis projected such visual intimacy either backward or forward in time, to either the Temple or the messianic era. Part of the construction of Rabbinic sight, according to Neis, is their perceived lack of ability to see God in their own day.

The fourth chapter explores the erotic nature of vision as it is portrayed and legislated in Rabbinic texts. On the one hand, Neis argues, visuality in Rabbinic literature is heavily gendered: vision not only has a (male) gender, but gender is produced by the gaze itself. The object of the gaze becomes feminized, whereas the viewer becomes masculinized—the gaze itself, in line with extramissive notions of vision, is imagined to extend like a phallus in response to the desired object. Nonetheless, Neis also argues that Rabbinic discourses of erotic vision, particularly in their ascetic restrictions on the male gaze, also subvert the typical gendering of the gaze. She suggests that this "self-denial of human-human heterovisuality"—i.e., the proscriptive attitude towards erotic gazing—is presented as juxtaposed with the "restoration of divine-human homovisuality" (168).

The fifth chapter turns to idols, which are—much like women—a problematic object of visual attention for the Rabbis. Neis traces a number of different rabbinic approaches towards the proper way to visually engage with objects classified as "idols," paying particular attention to "looking away" (which she argues is a result of the rabbis' awareness of the potentially powerful spiritual experience entailed in gazing at a sacred image); "looking awry" (seeing as a destructive act that can have extramissive power to harm the idol); and "liturgical looking" (another actively destructive use of the gaze that is intended to harm the idol through a curse). Neis shows that the Rabbinic visual engagement with idols contained a wide number of possibilities for acceptable modes of vision, and that visually empowering techniques of looking at idols in fact helped the Rabbis to consolidate their identity in relation to their surrounding visual world.

Finally, in Chapter 6, Neis returns to the question of spiritually desirable vision. She argues that the Rabbis associated the sight of the sage, whose body was considered to emit the light of knowledge, with the sight of God's face. She points to the use of vision in Babylonian mnemonic techniques and Palestinian techniques of visualizing one's teacher in order to properly remember and attribute his teachings. For the Rabbis, the sight of the sage comes to stand in for the ability to visually access God.

Neis deftly analyzes an enormous range of material. She is well-versed in contemporary theories of vision and in feminist and post-colonialist critiques and the cultural contexts (Greco-Roman, Christian, and Zoroastrian) of her texts. In her treatment of the Rabbinic sources themselves, she combines sensitivity to historical layers within each text with the ability to use each work as a coherent document that is reflective of its producers and their cultural context. In her thoughtful argument in Chapter Two, for example, she traces the theme of seeing God's face across an entire tractate of the Babylonian Talmud, noting that "the progression and arrangement of material in [Tractate] b. Hagiga as a whole makes a case" for the Rabbinic longing for homovisuality with God and sense of loss due to the absence of the Temple (73).Such sensitive engagement with a theme throughout a whole tractate is rare for scholars of the Babylonian Talmud, who are much more likely to treat individual passages (sugyot) within the Talmud than a whole chapter, much less treatise.

Neis's treatment of the relationship between vision and language might have been usefully enriched by engaging further with the question of oral versus written transmission and pedagogy of Rabbinic texts. Within her discussion of the sage as a desirable and icon-like object of vision, Neis discusses the Late Antique idea of what she calls "visible teaching," a tendency to link sight with knowledge and memory. Neis also discusses Rabbinic writings that liken holy words to fire and light. However, these holy words were most likely spoken and not read.

The intersection of visual culture and Rabbinic literature (or indeed Jewish societies more broadly) has received little scholarly attention, and as such this book is a welcome addition to works such as Daniel Boyarin's "The Eye in the Torah" and Elliot Wolfson's Through A Speculum That Shines.3 Yet Neis's scholarship also reaches far beyond the boundaries of Rabbinics or of Jewish Studies, demonstrating how the Rabbis partook of and reacted to particularly Late Antique ways of seeing. Neis offers an enlightening contribution both to the study of Late Antiquity and to contemporary theories of vision and the senses.

Notes:

1. Unlike some other scholars, Neis intentionally does not distinguish between the terms "vision" and "visuality," preferring to "use the term visuality in its broadest sense to describe ways of being visual" (p. 25). 2. The Masoretic text reads "will be seen" (yera'eh) instead of "will see" (yir'eh); nonetheless, as Neis points out, this seems to be the original meaning of the text. 3. Boyarin, Daniel. "The Eye in the Torah: Ocular Desire in Midrashic Hermeneutic." Critical Inquiry, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring, 1990), pp. 532-550. Wolfson, Elliott. Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994.

The editors' stated intention is to provide the latest thinking about Greek and Roman sport and spectacle and offer new insights into the social history of sport, while still keeping the book accessible to a wide range of scholars and readers outside of the academy. This is ambitious, but overall the volume meets those goals admirably. The volume makes abundantly clear that neither the evidence base nor interpretive theories for ancient sport and its sociology are static.1 All of the essays in this volume are, accordingly, very well documented and include extensive bibliography, plus a guide for further reading on each topic.

The volume's forty-three essays are divided into two sections, with twenty-four devoted to the Greek world, and twenty to Rome, with a final essay addressing Byzantium. The time-frame extends from the Aegean Bronze Age to the sixth century of our era. The Greek section contains particularly challenging and innovative approaches, and this review will devote a somewhat greater share of attention to those sections.

In keeping with the twin goals of the editors, the volume starts with an excellent overview of Greek athletics by the co-editor Donald Kyle, but the book does not dwell on predictable general topics like the ancient Olympics or on reconstruction of the rules and equipment of the Olympic events. Rather, the volume offers essays that embrace a wider swath of festivals and participants, with significant focus on sport and spectacle in the Roman world, and there is consistent attention devoted to the ideologies that informed these activities. The choice of scope and the intent to engage recent finds and theories naturally has the consequence that certain established (and important) debates and controversies receive little or no attention. Whether there was a peculiarly agonistic nature of Greek society as Jacob Burckhardt argued and Johan Huizinga contested is not a topic that appears in this volume. Theories about the origin of Greek athletics, anthropological and cultic, get brief, albeit insightful, mention (see especially the essays by Paul Christesen and Sarah Murray).

Instead, there are very up-to-date essays on Bronze and early Iron Age sport that delve carefully into the highly ambiguous evidence for those eras. There are separate essays on sport in Sparta, the Greek West, and the festivals of the northern Peloponnese and central Greece. The Beroia inscription is concisely and cogently discussed. Donald Kyle, not content with simple explanations, provides an excellent synthesis and analysis of possible motivations for the remarkable story of Kyniska, the daughter of the Spartan king Archidamos, whose four-horse chariot prevailed at Olympia in 396 and 392 BCE. Turning to Rome, important and illuminating topics that might well be overlooked, such as female gladiators and the social messaging of public executions in the Roman arena, are explored.

Appropriately for a volume that aspires to address the state of scholarship, much attention is devoted to critical reading of ancient evidence and the challenges of understanding why sport and spectacle assumed their particular shapes and nature in the ancient world. H.W. Pleket contributes two important essays on epigraphic matters. The first argues that the inscriptions allow us to get past the mindset of a small, elite group of literati to an understanding of the self-image and aspirations of the athletes. Here, and in earlier studies, Pleket has used the epigraphic evidence to illuminate the consistently ennobled and aristocratic ideology of the athletes, even when the pool of competitors widens to include a significant number of non-elites. In his second essay, Pleket uses the inscriptions to show the burgeoning of athletic festivals in Asia Minor and the elaborate diplomacy of gaining recognition for a festival as a "crown game," that is, one at which victors could expect the same rewards and privileges from their home cities that victors at the four great festivals of the mainland (Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and the Isthmus) received when they returned with their wreaths. The inscriptions give evidence, too, of the local interest in home festivals, sometimes restricted to citizens of a given town. In other words, we see an athletic world less prestigious, but much larger than Olympia. Sofie Remijsen contributes an important essay, largely documented with papyrological evidence, on the growth of contests in Hellenistic Egypt, among them the Megala Antinoeia (at Antinoupolis) and isantinoeios contests at Oxyrhynchus and Leontopolis. The vibrancy of the "agonistic market" of which Pleket wrote is writ large in these documents.2

Macedonia and the Greek West are the focus of fine essays by Winthrop Lindsay Adams and Carla Antonaccio. Antonaccio explores cogently the magnetism that mainland festivals held for the elite of Magna Graecia and Sicily. Adams challenges the commonly held view that Alexander the Great disdained athletics. Much in keeping with the goal of the volume to be on the cutting edge of research, David Romano advances the possibility that the Lykaia in Arcadia may predate the ancient Olympics.

One of the Companion's strengths is its investigation of the sources and the times it challenges traditional interpretations of both visual and textual evidence. In keeping with the most recent scholarship, Jeremy Rutter dismisses the idea that both male and female acrobats participated in Minoan bull leaping.3 Several essays engage the debate on the extent to which gladiatorial combat represented a sport. The frequent references to missio sparing the defeated gladiator, the presence of a referee, and the existence of rules do suggest the world of sport, and, as Louis Robert pointed out in Les gladiateurs dans l'Orient grec(Paris 1940), Greek inscriptions often use boxing vocabulary to refer to gladiatorial events. Michael J. Carter's essay, "Romanization Through Spectacle in the Greek East," notes that blunted weapons were sometimes employed, arguably bringing the skilled dueling of the gladiators closer to the world of sport. Carter suggests that the dichotomy of participatory Greek athletics and passive Roman spectators is a misconception. He does not, however, explore the different social messaging of a stadium consisting of earthen banks with few, if any, spectator comforts, and the elaborate mechanisms of the arena, complete with vela (awnings) and sparsiones (sprays). Nor does he delve more deeply into the definitional issue of whether an activity in which the participants are bound by oath to obey the commands of their keepers – to the point of offering their chests for the death stroke – qualifies as sport.

Paul Christesen, the volume's co-editor, contributes an important essay on the role of sport in democratization. Particularly striking is his attempt to place the remarkable institution of athletic nudity in this context. Chronologically, nudity's appearance in Greek sport could coincide with the movements in Sparta that made all citizens homoioi ("equals"), and Christesen adduces the often-ignored point that there is no socioeconomic leveler like nakedness. Thus, as aristocracies yield ground to the political power of farmer hoplites and the world of the gymnasium aligns with military preparedness, the citizen-soldier-athlete emerges in a naked equality. Less convincing, but still very worthy of consideration, is Christesen's suggestion that the absence of a "farmer's tan" would be the immediate emblem of the kaloskagathos, discouraging to the poorest citizens. The doughty hoplite, however, would labor on his land and was as likely as a pauper to show the uneven effects of the sun. It would be appropriate, too, for Christesen to engage more deeply with the challenge that the late David Young advanced to consider the possibility of an even more radical egalitarianism in Greek sport. Aristotle (Rhet. 1365a, 1367b) wrote that the fishmonger who won the boxing crown at Olympia did something beyond expectation. But how far beyond expectation?

Nigel Nicholson adopts a New Historicist perspective in a thought-provoking essay that focuses on the social tensions that underlie the representations of the boxer's beauty, moral excellence, and skill. In itself, such praise does not necessarily indicate, as Nicholson suggests, defensiveness about the social status of the boxer. Much of what he interprets as an emphasis on aristocratic ideology could be drawn from a common well of pugilistic encomia. The elemental nature of boxing, combined with the inevitable muscular development of the pugilist, has throughout history made boxers objects of attraction, always in tension with the (almost inevitable) facial damage caused by the sport. Moral excellence is similarly a predictable topic for advocates of violent sports, with their tension between primal ferocity and the rules and discipline that hold it in check. This is why the metaphor of combat sport was such a rich topic for Philo and for the early Christians. Assuredly there was a long-standing impulse to clothe sport in the vocabulary of the aristocracy, as H.W. Pleket convincingly demonstrated, athletes do not receive wages, they receive dora, "gifts," like Homeric heroes, and aristocratic ideology persists long into the Greco-Roman period.4 Arguably, this ennobling of sport does not indicate social tensions, rather than a natural tendency to optimize the rewards of the contest. Nicholson observes that the three Pindaric odes that praise boxers do not speak of skill. He interprets this silence as a meaningful hesitation to adduce something that could be seen as advantage acquired by training rather than birth, and his reference to Pi. I. 4.34-5 supports that view. But if that is the case, Nicholson needs to explain why in Iliad23, Nestor's advice to Antilochus before the chariot race is a paean to metis "craft," and Demosthenes 4.40 characterizes the barbarian style of boxing as devoid of strategy. It is unclear to this reviewer that the theoretical lens of struggles over class, ethnicity, gender, etc. and the interpretive schema that Nicholson constructs significantly advance understanding of the sociology of sport.

Overall, there is a strong tendency in the essays to rely on recent scholarship. This is appropriate for a volume that seeks to provide the latest thinking, but there is danger of losing the dialogue with older scholarship. Clearly, even a volume of 658 pages cannot be comprehensive, but it is important to note what is no longer in the discussion. Jacob Burckhardt is absent, as are Victor Ehrenberg's insights into the social displacement caused by the hoplite phalanx (Ost und West [Leipzig 1935] 63-96). Keith Hopkins' seminal chapter on the elements of social control in the Roman arena, "Murderous Games" in Death and Renewal [Cambridge 1983]1-30 receives relatively little attention, as does the fundamental essay of Clifford Geertz', "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight," The Interpretation of Cultures [London 1975] 412 ff. Although several essays investigate the Christian response to the spectacles, the richly nuanced dialectic of church and stadium discussed in Reinhold Merkelbach's important study, "Die griechische Wortschatz und die Christen," ZPE 18 [1975] 101-148 gets only passing notice. In keeping with the volume's focus on the marginal populations involved in sport and spectacle, there is some attention devoted to the Jewish response to Greco-Roman sport and games. But there is limited discussion of the Maccabean revolt, in which the Hellenistic gymnasium had a significant role, and no discussion of the Alexandrian riots during the reign of Caligula, partly caused by Jewish desire to participate in the local games, or of Philo of Alexandria's rich use of sport metaphors. The scholarship of e.g., Saul Lieberman, Jonathan Goldstein, and Manfred Laemmer is absent from the bibliographies of these essays, and there are virtually no citations of the rabbinic sources illuminating the topic.

It would be wrong, however, to focus on what is not in the volume, rather than what is in it. It succeeds admirably in presenting in a clear and coherent way an up-to-date overview of the vast majority of the most important issues in the study of ancient sport and spectacle. The Companion is a major contribution to the understanding of the social history of the ancient world for which we should be grateful. It will certainly stimulate and direct scholarly inquiry, and the editors have done well to make its erudition accessible to a wide range of readers.

Notes:

1. It is a fine irony that the Companion's publication just slightly anticipated the publication of an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (POxy 5209) documenting one of the most egregious examples of bribery in ancient athletics! 2. H.W. Pleket, "Games, Prizes, Athletes, and Ideology," Stadion 1, [1975] 55-71. 3. This reviewer is not convinced, however, by his arguments against the interpretation of the decorations of the Tanagra Larnax as scenes from funeral games: although worn, the iconography clearly shows an armed combat, which, along with the chariots, invites comparison with the contests in Iliad 23, cf. Wolfgang Decker, "Die mykenische Herkunft des griechischen Totenagons," Stadion 8/9 [1982-83] 1-24. 4. H.W. Pleket (see n. 2, above) 84-87.

Readers should beware of this book, which is an ambitious analysis of all of Thucydides (including especially Book Eight) disguised as a relatively slim paperback volume. It is more substantial reading than they might expect, and although it is very clearly written and the author invests much energy in describing Thucydides' narrative and speeches, it will best suit readers who have already thought about Thucydides quite a lot. For these, and for brave beginners, the book offers a fresh and independent minded analysis.

Classicists who study Thucydides will quickly notice that Hawthorn is immune to the authority of famous passages and scholarly consensus. For instance, he is impressed neither by the first sentence of the History: "[Thucydides] would have been prescient indeed if he foresaw a great war at the faltering start . . ." (3), nor by the eulogy for Pericles at 2.65 . . . "an incomplete assessment of Pericles and wrong about most of the other [leaders]" (65); ". . . As historical judgments, they do not do him justice and one can regret that he set them down" (67). By contrast, against an array of scholars contending the opposite he argues that book eight is a kind of masterpiece. "He writes of [the politics of those years] with his best dispassionate passion" (2) or "with brilliance" (203).

This, then, is a book that rethinks from the beginning and challenges its readers to do the same. The writing can be correspondingly intricate. For example, in Chapter Three Hawthorn begins to examine Thucydides' presentation of the causes of the war. "Thucydides remarks that Sparta's fear, which he believes to be the 'truest cause' of the war, was 'the one least openly stated' at the time (1.23.6). . . He leaves it to the reader to see how in the years before the start of open hostilities between Sparta and Athens, it was to be exaggerated arguments advanced by an ally of Sparta's in response to events which need not in themselves have been decisive that for a different and deeper reason caused Sparta to move to war, and that for reasons of its own, the leadership in Athens let it do so" (28).

Whether or not one agrees with every clause of this summary, it offers a condensed analysis of substantial sections of book one, and provokes the reader to refine his or her own ideas. Were the Corinthians' arguments exaggerated and the quarrels over Epidamnus and Potideia not decisive? Did the leadership in Athens simply not stop the Spartans from taking the decision to go to war? And what was the Spartans' "different and deeper reason" for doing so? In Hawthorn's view it was that Spartan pre-eminence had become a "necessary identity." "If they were to concede [Athenian pre-eminence], they would no longer be seen by anyone, including themselves, to be the people they thought they were and had devoted so much, indeed everything, to remaining" (49-50). Readers might initially find Hawthorn's terminology superfluous: wouldn't we normally call this "necessary identity" "honour"? Maybe, but Hawthorn's "necessary identity" might be a useful clarification of the term "honour", which is sometimes used so broadly as to be useless for thinking with. By contrast, here we have a carefully defined idea.

Other arguments are deceptively simple. For instance, Hawthorn argues that Thucydides represents the Archidamian War as lasting so long because neither side could figure out what to do. "[T]he Spartans could not see how otherwise [i.e. otherwise than by wasting Attica] to take the war to the Athenians, and the Athenians could not see how to take the war to the Spartans at all" (68). In the absence of a plan for winning "Each [side] could only harness the resources it had and try to acquire more, take what opportunities it had to disadvantage the other, and otherwise try to maintain its position…[I]mprovisation, haste, hesitation, and accident" (71) were thus characteristic of the war, as Thucydides tells it. Again, one must test Hawthorn's description against one's own views. Personally, I thought his argument was quite convincing, and I particularly appreciated Hawthorn's emphasis on how the great powers' aporia made them vulnerable to the persuasions of third parties (76, 79, 81).

In Hawthorn's view, this planless war of attrition ends in 413, after Athens's defeat in Sicily, when the two great powers finally discover clear strategic aims (202), if not clear strategies (e.g. 205, 221). Together with this change, Thucydides finally hits his stride as a political writer, and begins anew, just as does the war itself. Hawthorn devotes the central section of this chapter to a fine retelling of book eight, "Thucydides' most sustained and compelling exposition of practical politics" (226). His chapter reminded me that book eight is poorly understood, and called to mind how little serious work compares, contrasts, or argues with Hawthorn's description; Rood (1998) remains the main analysis.1

If we see Thucydides as Hawthorn does, the text really has two parts: books one through seven, and book eight, which begins a new kind of narrative. This division of Thucydides entails some reliance on the idea that the historian progressed towards the abilities he displays in book eight. This idea is not new, as Hawthorn explains, citing, for instance Macleod and Dewald. 2 What is new, at least to me, is the contention that in book eight Thucydides exposes new skill as a political writer (203). Overall, of course, Hawthorn gives the political character of Thucydides' writing more attention than classicists are used to. For instance, he gives the relation of speech and narrative an explicitly political character: "Political rhetoric was an art in which Thucydides took great interest and no doubt much pleasure, but for him to place it as he did, and thus expose it was itself a political act" (235). By this argument, the text of Thucydides is organized politically, in that it consistently exposes political speech to the fire of corrective fact, and is also in itself a political statement, equivalent to a warning: "Speeches… were an essential part of politics; but they were no more to be trusted on events in the present and what might follow for the future than were poems and chronicles on the past" (233). One must conclude that the History is therefore addressed to a political audience, i.e. one for whom this organization would be productive.

Fortunately, Hawthorn has a generously broad view of the political. He is not, it seems to me, trying to claim Thucydides for a single discipline, and this also shows in his bibliography, which includes as many classicists as social scientists as philosophers. He relies on the excellent new translation of Jeremy Mynott,3 quotations from which support both the accessibility and intelligibility of his argument. Moreover, although he sees Thucydides' "utility" for us today in political terms, these terms are such as to free us, in fact, from the jargon of the social sciences. "Politics remain," he observes, despite the growth of organizational institutions, "and…if we describe these in ways that do no more than mirror general aspirations and formal manifestations, or in the languages of the twentieth century as forces of a 'structural' kind, the exercise of 'rational choice' or the expression of a 'culture', they can be occluded. We need to be able to see them as politics, and in the clarity of an almost incomparably more elemental context, this is what Thucydides allows us to do – incomparably well" (238).

To sum up, those who have read Thucydides closely will both get the most benefit from the arguments made here and also find the most to disagree with. Compare Hawthorn to David Gribble (1998) on 2.65: by contrast to Hawthorn, Gribble makes a strong argument for seeing the culmination of central Thucydidean themes in this chapter.4 I found it difficult to accept some of Hawthorn's other ideas, such as his suggestion that "one can read him [Thucydides] to incline to a non-separability thesis on motive, intention and action and a non-isolability thesis on motive, intention and action and their context" (149, cf. 232). I cling to arguments made e.g. in Schneider (1974) or Baragwanath (2008):5 it seems to me that Thucydides worked hard to separate out those four factors for the reader, although he may indeed have exposed the fact that our deepest motivations are hidden from ourselves. But disagreement on or questions about such points is small potatoes compared to reconsidering the issues. Whether readers agree or not with particular arguments, this is a book to which they will be able to turn for an honest and intelligent interpretation of the whole.

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Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) publishes timely reviews of current scholarly work in the field of classical studies (including archaeology). The authoritative archive can be found at http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu.

This site was established to allow responses to reviews through the comments feature; all reviews from August 2008 have been posted.